Baghdad set a 770,000 b/d Ceyhan target for mid-August and no one has published the outcome
With Hormuz shut since early March, the Kurdistan pipeline to Turkey is carrying southern Iraqi barrels and SOMO is marketing Kurdish ones. The volume that decides whether that arrangement works has not appeared in public.
On 2 June the Iraqi cabinet set a target of raising flows through the pipeline to Turkey from 220,000 barrels per day to 770,000 b/d by mid-August, and Baghdad asked Kurdistan field operators to resume production to make it possible, according to MEES reporting by Yesar Al-Maleki on 5 June. Zaidi met international oil company executives and KRG officials in Baghdad on 3 June, the day after the target was announced. The trajectory behind that figure is uneven: exports resumed at around 240,000 b/d in September 2025, ran near 200,000 b/d before the March suspension per Shafaq News citing an unnamed North Oil Company source, and fell to 40,000 b/d and “sometimes only 20,000” in early March, which a senior Oil Ministry source told Rudaw was “too low a volume to keep the pipeline operational.” Mid-August has passed. Neither SOMO loading data nor Turkish throughput figures surfaced in this desk’s search.
The commercial scaffolding around the route is newer than the route. MEES reported on 21 August that the federal government, the KRG and the region’s operators renewed the tripartite agreement covering exports to Ceyhan, and that an IOC executive said the renewal runs to 27 January. That date rests on one unnamed executive; no KRG or Oil Ministry statement confirming it was retrieved, and it should not be treated as formally announced. The renewal sits on top of an interim Baghdad–Ankara arrangement, reported by MEES on 7 August, letting exports continue for a year after the Iraq–Turkey Pipeline treaty expired in July 2026. Meanwhile the direction of the trade has inverted: after an 18 March federal–KRG agreement Kirkuk crude began moving to Fishkhabour, and by early April Basra crude was being trucked north and blended at Kirkuk before entering the pipeline, per Kurdistan24 citing the Ministry of Natural Resources and an unnamed North Oil Company source.
Assessment: The usual framing has Erbil dependent on Baghdad’s tolerance for the northern pipeline. With Hormuz closed and southern barrels trucked north to reach Ceyhan, the dependency runs the other way, and the party negotiating for Erbil is a caretaker — the Kurdistan Region has had no government since 2024, per the House of Commons Library. That is why the missing August number matters more than the renewal announcement: a signed tripartite deal is a claim about intent, throughput is a fact. Treat 27 January as unverified until the ministry publishes text. If the 770,000 b/d figure is never reconciled, read the silence as the answer.